Wandering Team Aims For A Place To Call Home Base

Field's Neighbors Throw Strikes

July 06, 1989|By DAVID RISSER Staff Writer

YORK — Minor league baseball teams have come and gone on the Peninsula, but the semi-pro York Stars have endured for almost 45 years. This year, York's boys of summer are enduring without a home field.

They left their ballpark near Wolftrap Road at the end of last year's season because the owner wanted to increase the annual rent to $3,500, said Floyd Harrod, president of the team. The Stars had paid $350 and a small portion of their concession stand sales.

The Stars want to play near Lightfoot, at a ballpark where the now-defunct Williamsburg Cardinals used to swing bats. The team is facing opposition from neighbors who have bad memories of the ballpark.

The former Cardinals park is on Carters Neck Road, wedged between secluded homes in York's Skimino area and Camp Peary, an armed forces experimental training facility.

The Stars, who play in the predominantly black, 11-team Central Baseball League, won the league championship last year with a 16-13 victory in the sixth game of a best-of-seven series against the Gloucester All-Stars. Other league teams include the Chuckatuck Trotters and the Smithfield Sluggers.

The Stars formed as the Grafton Black Sox in 1945 during an era when Grafton and other small towns had distinct identities accompanied by distinctly segregated baseball teams. The Stars welcomed their first white player in 1960 and now have several.

Three former professional players - including York Sheriff's Deputy Ron Dillard - play for the Stars. The rest of the players are students, coaches and other regular guys.

"We have been playing on the road, playing our home games at the other teams' fields," Harrod said. "When you have nowhere to practice, it's hard to keep a team together."

Joshua Palmer, a friend of Harrod's, owns 47 acres that includes the overgrown Cardinals ballpark. Palmer has applied for a special use permit that will be considered by the Planning Commission on July 11 and the Board of Supervisors in August.

Tommy Louke, a Carters Neck Road resident leading neighborhood opposition to the Stars' proposal, says he has nothing against baseball but doesn't want a popular semi-pro team playing about 600 yards from his front door.

"It has been three or four years since they've played ball here, and it has been nice," said Louke, a brick mason who moved into his house in 1975 when the Cardinals were playing.

Baseball fans block the narrow road with their cars, leave garbage scattered through the neighborhood and "sit out there on the street drinking beer and carrying on" long after the game ends, Louke said.

"The place looks like the city dump after a ball game," he said. "I don't want the thing to start back up around here again."

Jay Butterfield, who is trying to sell 29.5 acres across from the ballpark site, said he will ask the Planning Commission to recommend denial of the proposal.

"I am not willing to put up with the traffic, the garbage and the parking problems," he said.

Supervisor Sandra Lubbers, who represents the election district that contains the ballpark, said she has met with both sides but will not form an opinion until after the Planning Commission meeting.

Harrod defended the team's proposal to play on Carters Neck Road.

"I've been going up there for 40 years, and I've never seen that road blocked."

The ballpark will have plenty of off-street parking, Harrod said. Garbage "won't be a problem" because Palmer, the owner of the land, is a garbage hauler.